20 million meals: how you can make a difference

How can you help the millions of people who have turned to a foodbank over the past 12 months?

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The Below The Breadline report, which was released earlier today, reveals that 20,247,042 meals were given to people in food poverty between 2013/14. It comes hot on the heels of a report by the Trussell Trust in April that revealed that nearly a million people turned to foodbanks in the past 12 months.

So how can you help?

The charity FareShare is teaming up again with Tesco supermarket for a weekend of action from July 3-5.

This will be the fourth national food collection that the chain has hosted. Since 2012, customers and the store have donated 10.2 million meals.

On entering, shoppers are given a list of potential items to buy, such as tea, pasta and tinned vegetables. Signs throughout the store point out potential goods and these are usually from its Everyday Value range.

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The supermarket then tops up the donations by almost a third – it donates an additional 30% of items given on the day. It also donates surplus food from its online and fresh distribution centres. This is the equivalent of seven million meals a year of surplus food.

All local foodbanks will be taking part in the collections and welcome volunteers to help collect donations and hand out shopping lists. Even if you can only spare an hour over the three days, it will make a big difference to the organisations.

There are also collections held in Waitrose, One Stop and other stores. Look out for details in Xn or in the stores themselves.

Foodbanks welcome individual donations, these can be left in your local church or taken to their offices.

Xn is impartial. We won’t ever tell you how to vote, what to think or what to do, unless it’s who to vote for in Britain’s Got Talent (well done Jon, see you at Christmas). But 20 million meals given out in just 12 months? A staggering one…

A staggering 20 million meals were donated to hungry Britons living in food poverty in the past 12 months – and the charities who have handed them have branded it a “national disgrace”, blaming a perfect storm partly caused by changes to…